Mattoverse Electronics Analog Kick Drum

The Analog Kick Drum pedal is a pet project I have been working on for awhile. A handful of years ago I used to do a fair amount of solo one-man-band sets and I tried a variety of different foot drum setups from real kick and snare drums on stage to triggers using an Alesis drum brain.

This is a pedal that I wanted to make for myself so that I could have a simple bass drum sound in a guitar pedal format that could either be run directly into a P.A. or through a pedalboard. I am hoping to build off this concept and potentially build an Analog Snare Drum pedal at some point as well and potentially incorporate those sounds into some of the drone synths in the future.

The basic idea is very similar to those wooden stompbox things you see around, but instead of a piezo trigger or contact mic inside of a hollow wooden box, this is a momentary switch triggering a transistor generated analog kick drum sound.

The pedal can be used standalone or you can feed an instrument through it. The instrument input passes through a high impedance transparent unity gain buffer.

There are three controls, Volume, Tone, and Body. I tried to dial in a good basic usable sound for the pedal, thus the body control is subtle and its effect is most noticeable when running directly into a P.A. or recording interface etc.. The tone control simply cuts high frequencies. When running through a guitar amp it provides a way to reduce the snap of the bass drum hit etc.. The character of the pedal changes a bit based on the amp it is run through with guitar amps naturally cutting out more sub frequencies than a bass amp would allow through.

Beware: The Analog Kick Drum can output very low frequencies, be mindful of your speaker health when using it at high volumes.

Note: Watch the demo with headphones if possible, cell phones and laptops speakers don't do low frequencies very well...

This first run is micro concept run of 11 units with 8 being currently available. Based on interest and user feedback I may potentially make more in the future or modify the concept slightly (artwork, features, layout) in future runs or this may be the only ones I ever make...